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Slide Launches New Animal-Raising Game SPP Ranch
December 4th, 2009
| By Eric Eldon | 9 Comments » |
Big Facebook application developers have been cranking up their launch cycles to try to come out with higher -quality games faster than their competitors, with some recent examples being CrowdStar’s Happy Pets and more recently Zynga’s PetVille. But, the most recent example we’ve seen is a new game from Slide, a spin-off title from SuperPoke Pets called SPP Ranch.
The SuperPoke Pets brand has been around for a year and a half, and this new title intends to capitalize on it by using the same pet characters and art.
Like another recent Slide title, Top Fish, the main mechanic is raising virtual creatures to earn points, allowing you then get more creatures, get objects to decorate with, etc. While in Top Fish you bought, fed and sold fish, in SPP Ranch you buy, feed (and water) and release painfully cute cartoony animals. This is more like the mechanic in farming games, and some aquarium games; the original SuperPoke Pets and other pets titles typically revolve around the long-term care 0f a specific pet.
In terms of the animal-raising genre, it is perhaps most similar to Beijing-based Rekoo’s Animal Paradise. A big difference between the two is that Animal Paradise lets you steal animals from other users — a feature that’s popular in many social games that we’ve seen come out of China. Many players in the United States and many other parts of the world prefer to not have that competitive element, from what we’ve seen.
There are also some other interesting features in SPP Ranch. For example, animals regularly make a “mess” (defecate) in their pen, so you clean up the mess to earn points. This is similar to a common virtual aquarium feature: Your aquarium gets dirty over time, but you can earn points by cleaning it.
Like other big developers, Slide, with 25.7 million monthly active users, has the ability to cross-promote new games like SPP Ranch with its range of large, existing applications — although the app just launched today so we aren’t seeing major growth yet.
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December 5th, 2009 at 2:57 am
Really nice game that is. Cute indeed
December 5th, 2009 at 9:26 am
great!
December 6th, 2009 at 9:02 am
[...] Slide Launches New Animal-Raising Game SPP Ranch [...]
December 14th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
[...] to AppData. Both games are simulations, with the former letting you raise virtual animals (or even steal them from your friends) while the latter is a virtual farming game. They’ve grown to prominence over the last half a [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 4:59 am
WTF? Not Scamming millions from MySpace or HI5 users with this one yet Max?
January 14th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
It is going to be tough to compete with farmville. petville is adorable – the interaction with the pets and their friends is incredible. If you guys at slide/spp don’t pull it together, you are in a heep of trouble! I am a long time spp fan and pet owner but these other apps become more attractive everyday.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I’ve played both SPPRanch and FarmVille. I deleted SPPRanch in a couple of days as lame and am still playing FarmVille. SPPRanch would probably appeal to little kids, like 5-8 years old.
January 15th, 2010 at 2:48 am
having been involved with superpoke pets and seen what slide considers constitutes customer service, I wouldn’t touch another of their products with a barge pole!!
they are an appalling company – ignoring real money issues of customers is just one small aspect.
the game has become steadily more difficult to play as they mess around with the program and our pleas to fix what is broken first before adding new things falls on totally deaf ears.
everything is the consumers fault – poor computer maintenance being a main one. Yet people who are computer experts and people with brand new computers have the self same problems.
big thumbs down for slide.
February 25th, 2010 at 11:05 am
cum imi fac si eu ,,,,dar pana atunci incercati superpoke pets ala e mai mijto si e pe hi5 …